


carry me home tonight

by bittereternity



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Bodyswap, Crack, Cracky fluff, Lots of drinking, M/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 02:36:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittereternity/pseuds/bittereternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This, Phil thinks, is apparently his life now: waking up in what is most definitely not his body to find a gerbil named Gerbil licking his face. On the plus side, there's alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol.</p><p>[Or: The Great S.H.I.E.L.D. Bodyswap: Clint and Coulson edition]</p>
            </blockquote>





	carry me home tonight

Most people, when describing a similar experience – and Phil knows this first hand, because you don’t get to be a senior S.H.I.E.L.D. agent without a high tolerance for events falling under the category of massive what-the-fuckery – would begin with: the first thing I noticed was.

Phil Coulson, to Nick Fury’s delight and his grandmother’s great consternation, has never been most people.

*

Phil wakes up on Monday with a horrible crick in his neck and something wet and slimy over his left cheek. After spending the weekend cleaning up after Loki’s latest demonstration of boredom, it’s hardly ideal. He cracks an eye open to look at the time displayed on his phone: far too early. Far, _far_ too early to deal with whatever liquid was trailing down his cheek. Vaguely, he hopes that it isn’t blood. He blinks and opens both eyes this time (and _yes,_ despite what the junior agents like to say, he does not, in fact, have a third eye), only to find his vision blocked by something black and furry on his chest. In retrospect, it says a lot about the sad state of his life that this isn’t the worst way he’s ever woken up. It barely cracks the top five.

He looks around and sees what is a certainly a cheap Ikea lamp to his left, on what is an equally cheap bedside table. There’s a blank wall to his left and a built-in closet on the other side. Directly across from him is an average television that has seen better days and a VCR, of all things. Tony Stark would be appalled. The room is absolutely everything he would never entertain in his apartment. But mostly, it definitely isn’t his room. _What the fuck._

All in all, not the most encouraging of developments. The last thing he remembers is dropping his keys on the table and staying awake just long enough to hang his suit up before crashing on the bed. _His_ bed. He props himself up on his elbows and tentatively wraps his hands around the black, fuzzy, _moving_ thing on his chest and brings it up to his eye-level, only to find a gerbil staring back at him. A black, pocket-sized gerbil whose legs disappear into its stomach, whose skin looks like it’s made of velvet; an actual fucking gerbil with beady eyes and long whiskers staring at him, decidedly unperturbed at the fact that they’ve never met each other before. It’s adorably cute. And it really raises a lot more questions than it answers. He has been through his fair share of abductions, but he’s never been subjected to a potentially lethal gerbil, and as such, doesn’t have a particular plan of action

Suppressing a sigh, he reaches for his phone, debating between calling S.H.I.E.L.D. for backup and calling Dr. Banner for an enlightening conversation on the potency of homicidal gerbils when he catches his own reflection on the display of his phone.

This isn’t right. He moves his face to the left, and the face that moves as his reflection is most certainly not his own. He shifts to the right, and the eyes that stare back at him aren’t his own either. He wiggles his shoulders, feeling a lot like he’s two years old discovering the magic of mirrors for the first time and no. That’s not him staring back. That’s not him at all.

Before he can think any further, his phone rings and he sighs, looking at the caller ID. _Here we go,_ he thinks.

*

“You stole my body.” Barton wails in his ear, and fuck if it isn’t creepy to hear your own voice on the phone.

“You have a pet gerbil,” he replies with a calmness he absolutely does not feel. Most people assume that he’s the closest they’ll ever come to watching a robot dressed up as a human being in live action. But the truth is that he _does_ panic. Not in the ‘break your furniture, shred your ties’ sort of way, but Phil Coulson panics like he does most other things: intensely, inwardly and without letting anyone know. It’s a skill that can only be formed after years of watching your asset with a bow, precariously balanced on the ledge of a roof, three seconds away from a freefall that can only end in death.

“You stole,” Barton begins again and then stops abruptly. “Wait, _what_?”

And when he wakes up and finds himself in the body of Clint fucking Barton, he panics a whole lot.

“You have a pet gerbil,” he repeats in a monotone, feeling a strong sense of denial washing over him. “At least, I hope it’s your gerbil, because otherwise I have to add a possibly radioactive lethal gerbil to the list of my problems. You have a pet gerbil who likes waking people up by licking their faces. What the fuck, Barton, _what the fuck_?”

The line remains quiet for a few seconds. He wants to think it’s because Barton’s decided to be clear-headed and calm about the whole swapping bodies thing, but the prospect of going home and not finding a single arrow wedged in his freshly wallpapered walls is looking bleaker by the minute.

“Maybe I should come over,” Barton finally replies, and he sounds wary in a way he’s never heard his own voice sound before. “We’ll do… something about all of this.”

Phil sighs. “Fine.”

The phone stays quiet on the other end for so long that he thinks that Barton has hung up on him when he hears his own voice again. “His name is Gerbil,” Barton says, because this is apparently his life now: waking up in what is most definitely not his body to find a gerbil named Gerbil licking his face.

“Of course it is,” Phil sighs again.

*

If he’d thought that hearing his own voice is weird, it’s nothing compared to seeing himself standing on the other side of the door. Barton’s wearing one of his shirts all wrong, a couple of buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and dear god, is that a coffee stain below the collar – _that’s Burberry for fuck’s sake_. He very carefully doesn’t concentrate on how his shirt stretches over Barton’s chest and almost makes the buttons pop out, how it outlines the arches of his back when he turns in a way that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Absolutely not.

Phil shakes his head and is weirded out all over again when Barton runs a hand through _his_ hair.

“You’re really balding, huh?” he smiles with _his_ teeth, the smug sonofabitch.

“You’re taking this awfully well,” he observes.

Barton shrugs, and this is all kinds of plain _creepy,_ seeing his own shoulders across the room from him under someone else’s volition. “Raided your wine cabinet, sorry,” he replies in a tone that isn’t apologetic at all.

Phil raises his – well, Barton’s, if you’re being all technical – eyebrow. “It’s eight thirty in the morning.”

“And I woke up in my boss’s bed in my boss’s body,” he waggles a finger. “I needed a break. Or five.”

Phil sighs again, and the way in which Barton scrunches his face suggests that he doesn’t really do a whole lot of sighing in general. “What’s the last thing you remember?” he asks.

Barton turns a chair around and plops down on it in a way he never would. He graciously decides not to mention the Armani trousers. “I went to bed,” he replies after frowning at the distance for a while. “Everyone was going back to the tower to unwind over shitty movies, but it was Sunday and I knew Gerbil would be around, so I decided to come back here to feed him.”

Phil decides to take a deep breath and tackle the sentence in parts, mostly to maintain the minimum of holds on his own sanity.

“About that,” he asks carefully, because people can be oddly possessive about their pets, even people who name their animals Animals. “ _Why_ exactly do you have a gerbil?”

Barton looks affronted. It’s not really a good look on his face, he finds out. “I don’t _have_ a gerbil,” he says, body taut in a defensive posture like that time he inadvertently let slip that he’s watched all five _Bring it On_ movies. _I needed motivational pointers for the newbies,_ he had repeated again and again but they had all known that it was really the compelling lives of high school cheerleaders. “I found it lurking outside once and thought I’d give it leftovers,” he pauses for a second. “It comes back sometimes.”

“It comes back sometimes,” Phil echoes, because it’s been that kind of morning so far.

“It comes back when it’s hungry and I feed it,” Barton says, matter-of-fact.

He’s seen Barton eat nothing but take-out for days on end before spending hours on an elaborate, obscure recipe to make something that looked a lot like pie and tasted a lot like bananas gone wrong. The mere thought that Barton is capable of cooking normal, non-lethal, non-detailed food has somehow utterly escaped his attention. “You _cook_?” he asks, just to be safe.

Barton looks uncomfortable. “I have Fruit Loops,” he says. “He likes them with a little milk.” He makes a gesture with his fingers. “Not too much milk, though. Just enough to get them partially wet.”

Phil rubs his eyes and sits down slowly. “Okay, Barton,” he speaks carefully, “I’m going to stop talking to you because this conversation makes me feel like I’m drifting into some sort of a twilight zone.” Barton doesn’t look like he cares much either way.

Phil puts his head in his hands.

*

He’s spent so long focusing on Barton occupying his body that it takes him a while to remember that he’s occupying Barton’s as well. Not until he sees Barton’s closet, that is.

“Do you have anything that fits?” he asks, casually looking over the shelf of neatly folded clothes, an alarming amount of black that gives him uneasy flashbacks to those few goth weeks in high school. He suppresses a shudder.

Barton gives him a look. “Everything fits.”

 _No,_ he wants to explain patiently, _most of these clothes look like they’ve been painted on,_ but he’s pretty sure a conversation going down that road would lead to him inadvertently revealing something far too embarrassing. Instead, he rummages through Barton’s shelves rows of black to find something that looks reasonably official. With sleeves.

“Hey,” Barton calls out from where he’s slumped on his chair after he’s discarded one too many t-shirts, “be careful. You’re messing up my color codes.”

*

Turns out, getting Barton to dress up in a suit is like getting a monkey to waltz. It’s not theoretically impossible, but mostly it just doesn’t happen. They’ve been back at Phil’s place for at least a half hour, and so far he’s done nothing but stare mournfully at Barton manhandling his suits and occasionally pouring more wine into his glass before setting it on his coffee table without a coaster, letting the condensate drip on the table in all its glory.

“Why do I have to button my collar?” Barton frowns at his – well, rather, _not-_ his – reflection in the mirror. “It just feels so restrictive. And I don’t like the tie.”

Phil tries to recall the expression on his kindergarten teacher’s face when a student was particularly unruly. “You’re wearing the tie,” he replies simply.

Barton’s shoulders slump. “I told you we shouldn’t go in to work today.”

“And I told you that we should do something that’s… normal for us. Try to adapt to the situation.”

“But I just saved the great island of Manhattan a mere two days ago. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Phil feels the beginnings of a headache stirring at his temples. “Just wear the damn tie,” he grits out.

*

“Where’s your…” Phil trails off once he’s finally managed to drag Barton to HQ, and then pauses. “You _do_ have an office, don’t you?” he asks carefully. In theory, all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are assigned their own office space but every time he’s seen Barton around base, it’s either at the range or the cafeteria or the air ducts. _Fuck,_ the air ducts.

Barton makes a great show of looking at his watch, the bastard. “Well,” he informs cheerfully, “it’s nine AM, so I’m scheduled for my daily patrol in the ceiling.”

Phil clenches his jaw. “We _have_ a whole division for security. They’re even conveniently named Security,” he points out.

Barton claps his shoulders, a move that raises a few eyebrows around them because Phil doesn’t think he’s ever touched an agent so casually during work hours. Or even _off_ work hours. Which is a little sad. He decides to stow away that particular piece of information for his quiet brooding time. “But how else would I get the _gossip_?” Barton smiles, all teeth, before walking away towards the direction of Phil’s office, no doubt to drool all over his paperwork and steal his scotch.

“Chop chop,” he calls over his shoulder and Phil squares his shoulders. Sometimes, he really, really hates his job.

*

Natasha knows. Of fucking _course_ she knows.

One moment he’s helping himself to a bagel in the break room, a mug of steaming coffee in his left hand and the next, the coffee is all over his shirt (Barton’s shirt, his mind supplies gleefully), and he’s pinned to the wall with a knife over his throat.

“Who are you?” Natasha growls in his ear. The few other people around don’t bat an eye at this display, which makes him wonder how often Clint and Natasha engage in activities that may be construed as kinky foreplay. He likes to think that his reflexes are normally a lot faster, but it’s barely ten and he’s already had a gerbil named Gerbil and a Clint at his throat. Surely, there needs to be some sort of a limit.

“Who are you?” Natasha slams him against the wall again, and really, her knee is inching dangerously close to his groin. “And where’s Agent Barton?”

“It’s Coulson,” he chokes out, eyeing the steel against his throat carefully for sudden movement. “It’s me, Phil, _Jesus_ Nat.”

The knife slackens a millimeter, although Natasha’s posture shows no change. “Prove it,” she hisses, calm and slow, the anger in her eyes visible to him only because he’s known her for years.

Phil tries to take a deep breath without arching towards the knife. “I had to implement an emergency extraction plan when you and Barton went off the grid to get drunk and eat fried Mars bars at Fringe, August, two years ago. You threw up all over me on the way back.”

Natasha tilts her head. “How compromised _are_ you?”

He takes a second to breathe because she looks like she’s definitely leaning towards lowering the knife. “I’m not,” he tells her truthfully. “It’s just, we’ve seemed to swapped bodies,” and _fuck_ if that isn’t one of the weirdest sentences to come out of his mouth.

“Do you know if you have a tracker on you?”

Phil thinks of stripping in Barton’s bedroom and rifling through his closet to look for the least conspicuous clothing. “I’m pretty sure there isn’t.”

“Oh,” Natasha takes a step back, looks rather disappointed. “Then it’s just weird.”

Phil leans his head back against the wall. “Yeah,” he closes his eyes.

*

 _Did you know there’s an actual color-coded roster for mission rotations?_  Clint texts him just when he’s managed to align himself in a relatively comfortable position within the air duct above the range.

This really isn’t the ideal way to spend the morning, Phil supposes, but after the fourth arched eyebrow and comment about how he’s still on ground level, he’s had no choice but to do something about it. For the sake of keeping up appearances, at least.

 _What,_ he types back, lying on his stomach over the range. _You’re not cleared to know that._

When no answer is forthcoming in the next minute, he pulls his phone out again. _Why do you know that,_ he types.

Clint’s reply takes only two seconds. _I’m in your meeting ;)._ Ah, fuck.

 _You’re not cleared to know that,_ he writes back immediately, although he doesn’t quite know how to transfer a stern expression over a text message.

 _But you are,_ Barton replies, and yes, there’s that winky face again.

_Barton._

_Relax. Sitwell came to get me, what else was I supposed to do?_

Phil tries to turn around, but the roof of the vent is far too low against his head. He wonders how Barton can spend hours and hours crouched up here, sometimes just for the express purpose of scaring the shit out of someone. The view is grand, he grudgingly admits, but the walls are literally closing around him, and while he isn’t particularly claustrophobic, deliberating enclosing yourself isn’t really his choice of fun.

But then again, Barton’s been a soldier long before he’s ever been a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, an Avenger. Perhaps an empty wall against his back, a thorough knowledge of the walls around him is a source of comfort to him in a way Phil doesn’t quite understand, in a way that makes him ache a little. His phone vibrates again.

_So the color-coded roster, is that an actual serious thing?_

Phil smiles a little and brings up his knees closer to his chest. _Who do you think designed it?_

There’s no reply for a few minutes before his phone lights up again. _Sir?_

 _Yes, Barton?_ he types back.

_Your life is so boring._

Phil bites his lip. _Not as boring as I’d like it to be,_ he replies.

*

“Do you think we should talk about our feelings?” Barton has his feet up on Phil’s coffee table, his beer condensing sans coaster.

Phil looks up from picking off the pineapples from his side of the pizza. “ _What_?”

Barton scratches the back of his neck like he hasn’t quite thought the conversation through. Phil is willing to bet good money that he hasn’t. “It works in the movies, okay. The two people always hate each other in the beginning and then their bodies get swapped. Eventually, they have some sort of a deep, meaningful conversation followed by an epiphany and,” he flails his hands. “ _Tadaa._ ”

“But we don’t hate each other,” Phil feels compelled to point out the flaw in the plan. He squints. “And what kinds of movies do you watch?”

Barton takes another bite of a pizza, wrapping his tongue around the molten cheese at the sides in an attempt to get it all in one bite. Phil looks away quickly, licking his lips almost subconsciously and immediately pretending that he did no such thing. “Do _you_ have any other ideas, genius?”

Phil wipes his mouth neatly. “Fine, let’s talk. Are you feeling something you want to share that might lead you to an epiphany?”

Barton, to his credit, looks a little nauseated. “I really, _really_ hate cinnamon on French toast. Like, why would you ruin something perfectly savory and delicious by sprinkling cinnamon on top of it? Or worse, by mixing it in the batter.” He speaks earnestly like it’s a great travesty, and to him, it probably is.

Phil considers this. “And does it make you feel any better now that you’ve shared that little tidbit?”

Barton is silent for a few seconds and then: “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”

He bares his teeth. “Of course I am. Our lives aren’t a damn movie, Barton. If it were, everything would be resolved in two hours and we could all be going home, in our _own bodies_.”

Barton washes the last slice of pizza by taking a large gulp of his beer. “You haven’t shared anything,” is all he says.

*

He doesn’t see Barton the next morning until the Avengers meeting at ten  when he rushes in (through the door, thank fuck) thirty minutes later wearing _Phil’s_ disheveled Armani. Mostly, he concentrates on not lunging out and strangling Barton for what he really, _really_ hopes is yoghurt on the breast pocket.

“You’re late,” Fury barks out, a sentiment that’s echoed by Stark who sounds like he’s far too amazed by this turn of events.

“Son of Coul,” Thor booms out entirely unhelpfully, “Your tardiness had us all distressed.”

Barton throws a quick, panicked glance at his direction before clearing his throat. “I lost track of time looking over some classified files,” he says relatively smoothly. Phil hopes he’s the only one who can see the vague remains of his handprint on his cheek.

*

Phil spends most of the meeting with his head down and a neutral expression on his face, which is why it takes him a moment to realize that Fury’s stopped talking. To stare at not-him. Fuck.

Barton apparently notices the lull at the same time he does.

“Agent Coulson?” Mostly, Fury just sounds resigned. Phil can almost literally see Barton snapping to attention in his seat.

“Your face is doing things, Coulson,” Fury grits out.

Barton looks lost, an expression Phil hasn’t seen on his own face since that highly confusing sex-ed class in middle school where the teacher had made them all roll condoms onto a curved banana.

“Expressions,” Fury sounds like he would really like to take a break from babysitting and Phil finds that he resents that just a little. It might be traumatic and mortally dangerous and a threat to his sanity, but babysitting this bunch of misfits is his job and his job alone. “Your face is doing an expression, Coulson. You’re being… expressive. It’s very disarming.”

Barton looks like he’s torn between disappearing into the ceiling and ripping Fury’s head off. Phil hopes he’ll go with the second option and cheers him on silently.

*

A few hours after the debrief, Barton suggests that they take the rest of the day off to brainstorm and come up with a constructive solution to their problems.

 _I need to get the fuck out of here,_ are the exact words on the text he sends Phil.

 _Give me an hour and come over,_ Phil surprises even himself by the swiftness of his reply, and goes to look for the nearest exit.

*

 “I keep pinching myself to see if this is actually happening,” Barton tells him an hour later as he opens the door. He makes his way straight to the couch and lies down, absently grabbing the remote and looking like he’s always belonged in Phil’s living room. He feels an unsettling form of warmth course through him at the thought.

 “You mean, you keep pinching me instead,” is what he says instead.

Barton throws a cushion at him.

*

“What if we never change back?” Barton asks an hour later, deciding to switch from beer to vodka. Phil looks up at him vaguely from the floor of his living room and tries to make sense of all the thoughts slurring together in his head.

 “We probably will,” he replies in what he hopes is a soothing tone.

“But what if we _don’t_?”

Phil suppresses a burp. “We have to get a new Hawkeye,” he mutters, and the words are strangely sobering. Out of nowhere, he has the sudden urge to bang his head against the wall.

“There will be _so much_ paperwork,” he groans. Barton pats him gently on the head and pours some vodka into his beer. It tastes disgusting.

*

“The next time Fury insults your espresh,” Barton frowns and stops suddenly, although Phil has no idea why. It feel like he’s floating on a cloud made entirely of Guinness with an aftertaste of Smirnoff, and it’s rather pleasant.

Barton waves around the nearly empty bottle in his hand and begins again with renewed enthusiasm. “The next time Fury insults your espresh, exrpesh, your _face_ , you come to me, okay?” He slings an arm around Phil’s shoulder.

Phil agrees quite happily. “This is a _nice face_ ,” Barton emphasizes each of his words by poking him on the cheek and displaying a toothy smile. He grins back.

“I want to kiss your nose,” he whispers, but the words sound too loud to his own ears. Barton gives him a beatific smile.

“Nice face,” he repeats again. Phil leans in and kisses the top of his nose.

*

It takes a few hours before they make the move to wine. A part of Phil thinks it’s a very, very bad idea but the rest of him just wants to keep leaning on Barton’s shoulder and drink.

“If you could _choose_ a different body,” Barton asks him, “who would you choose?”

Phil snorts. “Captain America?”

Barton wrinkles his nose. “Then you have to wear tight spandex _all the time._ And carry a shield over your crotch,” he finishes with a giggle.

“Over what?”

Barton opens his mouth to reply and promptly dissolves in another fit of giggles. Phil wonders if it’s appropriate to boop his reddening nose. “The shield,” he finally replies. “It’s a mephator for his penis.”

Phil tries to frown appropriately but Barton’s giggles are infective, and out of nowhere, he finds himself out of breath with tears of laughter in his eyes. For a while, they’re both quiet except the random burst of laughter until: “I have a nice body, right?” Barton frowns. “Tell me I have a nice body.”

Phil nods in agreement. “You have a _very_ nice body.” He tries to poke himself to demonstrate his point but mostly it just hurts.

Barton seems satisfied and leans against his shoulder. “Good,” he says as Phil finally gives in and pokes him on the nose.

“Boop,” Phil agrees.

*

“Tell me something,” Barton sounds a lot more sober, although it could be because he’s just thrown up all over Phil’s magazine rack. “Isn’t this the weirdest fucking night of your life?”

Phil considers this although his eyes, to his annoyance, keep falling asleep. Barton slides down next to him with another bottle of wine and no shame.

“Well,” Phil replies after careful thinking and possible snoring. “Remember that one conversation where I had to convince this marksman to work for me and he laughed at my face? That was pretty weird, too.”

There’s a moment of silence where they both process what he’s just said.

“Oh,” Barton replies somewhat wistfully, and then throws up all over Phil’s lap.

*

Phil wakes up the next morning wondering why his shirt smells of vomit and his head feels like it’s been through a blender. Beside him, Barton is out like a light, his mouth open slightly and a trail of drool at the corner of his lips.

Ah. Well, fuck.

He pokes Barton on the shoulder repeatedly until he shifts and props himself up to stare blearily at him.

“Huh?” Barton blinks and grimaces at what he guesses is the aftertaste of every form of alcohol imaginable. Combined.

“I’m going to kill you,” Phil informs him cheerfully and goes back to sleep.  

*

The next time he wakes up, it’s mid-afternoon and he smells like a cross between a dead raccoon and rotten cheese. Or possibly, a raccoon who’s chosen to die on rotten cheese.

“We missed work,” he almost shouts, taking pleasure in the way Barton winces next to him.

“Fuck work,” he mumbles, sitting up and looking around in confusion. Phil wants to be pissed at being covered in vomit but watching Barton, vulnerable and unguarded with an adorably confused look on his face isn’t something he sees every day. Even if it technically isn’t his face. And those clothes aren’t his, anyway.

“That’s going to go on your performance evaluation,” he replies.

*

“Do you want a drink?” Barton asks him once he’s out of the shower, toweling his hair dry with one hand and rummaging through Phil’s fridge with the other.

Phil looks at him like he’s grown a pair of wings.

“I read somewhere that if you keep drinking, you’ll never get a hangover,” Barton tells him.

He pulls his bread out of the toaster. “And what about alcohol poisoning?”

“Well,” Barton considers, before shaking his head and helping himself to a very generous amount of Phil’s cereal. “I hope Gerbil isn’t too hungry,” he says after a while, looking mournfully at the milk in his bowl.

“I’m sure he has other ways to sustain himself,” Phil tries to be reassuring.

Barton scrapes his spoon against the bowl. “But he really likes Fruit Loops. And he’s been really hungry lately. I hope he doesn’t think I’ve forgotten him.”

Phil gives up on breakfast. With a sigh, he uncorks another bottle of wine and pours himself a glass before passing it over. “Drink,” he sighs.

*

“Do you think we should kiss?” Barton asks him. They’re on his couch watching reruns of _Judge Judy,_ and Phil is pleasantly buzzed. Not the kind that’s going to transform into a monstrous headache, but the kind that keeps your troubles at bay.

“Which movie is that from?”

Barton shrugs. “I feel like we should still try to come up with a grand epiphany.”

“And you think a kiss will help with that?” Phil wants to know.

Barton turns to look at him. “So kissing you isn’t going to be the answer to life, the universe and everything?”

Phil tries to smile. “Probably not.”

“Ah,” Barton replies, deep in thought for a second, and then he leans across and kisses him anyway.

*

Barton tastes like wine and stale booze and soap.

The kiss is rather nice. The kiss is rather fantastic.

*

Phil wakes up the next morning to distant screaming and pounding on his door.

He opens it blearily – because, really, how much more can possibly be wrong – and sees Barton right outside, practically jumping on the spot. Then, he blinks and looks again and it’s _Barton_ standing there, looking exactly like he does in his own body.

He opens his mouth to say something, and then closes it again and runs to look at himself in the bathroom mirror. When he sees his own reflection staring back at him, he’s desperately afraid for a minute that’s he going to start crying. Or break into song. Because what stares back at him are his own hands, his own balding hair, his own floppy hair.

“Wow,” Barton says from behind him.

“Wow,” he repeats.

*

Two days later, Phil enters his office to find Barton lounging there, twirling a pen in his hands.

“So,” he says when Phil looks over at him with a raised eyebrow. “It’s been an interesting few days.”

Phil gives him a _look_. “Interesting, sure,” he agrees.

Barton stays quiet for a moment before bursting out in shocked laughter. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “but I’m so fucking glad that I’m back in my own body.”

Phil scrubs his face with his hands. “Yes,” he agrees fervently. “I’m really glad this week is mostly over. It was,” he tries to search for a polite word before giving up, “a nightmare.”

Barton smiles at him, even as his expression shifts to something a little softer, a little unsure. “All of it?”

“Well,” Phil pretends to think even though every inch of his body vibrates with the surety of his decision.  “There were _some_ parts I might be convinced to repeat again.”

Barton’s smile is wide and open and his eyes crinkle at the corners. It’s very nice. Phil resolves to make him smile more often just to see that expression on his face.

“It’s a date,” he announces brightly and leans forward across the table to kiss him before pulling back slightly at the last moment like he’s just remembered where they are. Instead, Phil watches, slightly fascinated and weirdly charmed, as Barton takes his hand and kisses his knuckles.

“You idiot,” he mutters, and cringes at how affectionate the words sound to his own ears.

Barton smiles at him again before ducking out of the way. “It’s a date,” Phil calls after him.

*

Later, he wonders what the whole _point_ of the incident was supposed to be. He wonders what Stark or Dr. Banner would say if they ever came to know about it, if they would give him detailed explanations on the theory of space-time continuum and use words he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t quite rule out Loki, or some other supernatural object trying to exact a twisted sense of revenge. He tries to bring up the subject around Barton but he seems more than willing to put it aside as an oddity and never think about it. Barton has the worst kind of privilege, he thinks, to have the ability to believe in nothing.

He tries to let it go, but sometimes he wakes up in the morning with a start and automatically looks down to see if he’s still in his own body. On those mornings, he lies awake for an extra minute to see if he can figure out any all-encompassing point, see if there was any to begin with.

All he can think about is that everything he knows about Barton, about _Clint,_ he’d known long before waking up and finding himself in his body, known in a way that has always felt like knowing a part of himself.

Maybe that’s the point, he thinks sometimes: a reminder to let himself _see_.

*

A week later, he finds himself joining the Avengers in a _Welcome back to New York_ dinner for Jane. “So,” she says over drinks, after everyone has quieted down and decided to take a short break from stuffing their faces, “anything exciting since I’ve been gone?”

Thor launches into an entertaining yet surprisingly accurate detail of their last encounter and Phil half-listens, focuses mostly on Clint’s foot making its way up to his knee. There are a few second of silence after Thor finishes and then: “I totally forgot,” Tony exclaims. “Agent and Barton here ended up swapping bodies and then walked around pretending to be each other for a few days. It was _hilarious_.”

Clint’s foot stills against his and Jane turns around, full of sympathy. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she says. “That must have been horrible.”

Phil thinks of waking up and getting his face licked by Gerbil the gerbil and booping Clint’s nose and silently, he clasps Clint’s hand in his under the table.

“Yeah,” he smiles. “It really wasn’t that bad.”

**Author's Note:**

> if you have any questions/comments you would like me to answer separately, feel free to direct them towards my [tumblr](http://cllintbartons.tumblr.com)! :)


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